


ephemeral thing! do you address me?

by dirtybinary



Category: Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Dialogues - Plato, Symposium - Plato
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21828574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: On the eve of the City Dionysia, Aristophanes receives a menacing visitor.
Relationships: Alkibiades | Alcibiades (c. 450-404 BCE)/Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BCE)
Comments: 33
Kudos: 77
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	ephemeral thing! do you address me?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lemonsharks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, lemonsharks! I love both these two assholes, so I can't believe I had the good fortune to be matched to your request. Enjoy!

On the eve of the City Dionysia, the busiest night of any poet’s life, Aristophanes receives a divine visitation.

Midnight: the hour of Hekate, of murders and bewitchings, or at least drunken stumblings-home from the symposium. He’s nipped back from the theatre to catch a few hours’ sleep, change into a fresh chiton and do something about his hair, and make last-minute sacrifices to Dionysus and all relevant deities so nothing goes wrong on the morrow. He is splashing cool water on his face from the ewer by his bedside when a larking voice calls from the courtyard. “Anyone home?”

Aristophanes has, only in the last couple of years, reached the level of success at which one must fend off unwanted visitors in the night. “Good morning,” he says pleasantly, “and go away.”

No luck. Like the hellbirds that perch and scream in the tree outside his window before dawn, the visitor chirps, “Hullo!”

He will not sleep tonight, then. With the resigned somnambulism he typically achieves this time every year, Aristophanes pulls his chlamys around himself and steps out into the yard. The spring equinox is some weeks off; there is snow on the mountains still. At least he is only putting on the one play tomorrow. Euripides—gods have mercy on his trimetered soul—has three tragedies plus a satyr play to worry about, and is not expected to recover till summer at the soonest.

This is why tragedians are all half mad, and so very dour.

Like Hekate, the late-night caller is accompanied by a train of torch-bearing ghouls and the baying of hounds. “Hullo!” this nebulous figure cries, draping itself over Aristophanes’ gatepost in an enviable contrapposto. Not quite a Herakles, being lean, nor a Poseidon, being young, with honey-brown locks that curl glossily around his face in the torchlight. “Aristophanes! You knave!”

On second glance, the torches transpire not to be borne by ghouls but by a miscellany of actors and courtesans, flute-girls and dancing-boys, the likes of which have never been seen in this eminently respectable neighbourhood. The hounds belong to the old man across the street, who will not appreciate being woken at such an ungodly hour. Aristophanes makes the warding sign against evil. “Alcibiades.”

“ _That mincing sissy, Cleinias’ son_ ,” says the apparition at the gate. Its eyes are large and limpid, and harbour the faintest edge of accusation.

“Oh,” says Aristophanes, delighted. “You saw _Acharnians._ ”

“I did indeed.”

“A thespian, then. An admirer.”

“An injured party.”

Aristophanes looks the torchlit Narcissus up and down. Around his brow sits a garland of white anemones and violet hyacinths. There is the infamous trailing cloak, Tyrian purple embroidered with gold thread, its hem submerged in the muddy puddle where—just this evening—the hens had been pecking for worms. Aristophanes could weep for joy. “You look perfectly all right to me.”

The languid Ganymede sways towards him; then, finding himself bereft of anything on which to lean, retreats to the gatepost. “By Athena, I’ve been called a mincing sissy.”

He is barely older than Aristophanes, a few years at most. Not as tall, too, as he can appear when discoursing before the Boulé or gliding through the agora with a quail up his sleeve. Aristophanes says, “Aren’t you?”

In the street, the torch-bearers titter. “I am,” concedes the high-cheekboned Adonis, whose profile a coin would envy. “But only a select few are permitted to say it, and you are not among that number. Nor is your chorus leader. Or your layabout, what’s his name.” Alcibiades relinquishes the gatepost at last, to take a menacing step towards Aristophanes. “Dicaeopolis. That bastard who made peace with Sparta.”

He is not very tall at all. He is, in fact, the perfect height to rest his chin on Aristophanes’ shoulder if he so chose. Aristophanes vows sacrifices of thanks to every single denizen of Olympus. “And you’re very against peace, are you?”

“I’m very against defamation,” says the ship-launching Helen.

“Like Cleon.”

Alcibiades flaps the hem of his chiton in what might be a dismissive gesture. He smells like musk and marjoram, perfume that might be his own, or rubbed off on him. “I’m all for defaming Cleon.”

“But not Simaetha?” Aristophanes tries to think who else he might have recently slandered, to receive such a personage at his door. “Aspasia? I’ve not touched Pericles in at least a hundred lines.”

“More’s the pity,” says Alcibiades. “I could trade you a half-dozen funny stories about Uncle, in exchange for _Clouds_.”

“ _Clouds_ ,” says Aristophanes.

The lucent, upturned eyes glint at him, less hazy with wine than he first thought. “A philosopher in a basket.”

Aristophanes is heading towards an understanding as belated as it is unwelcome. “Socrates.”

“Him.”

 _Clouds_ is still some eight hours away from being performed for the first time, but there are no secrets in the theatre. Callisthenes and his actors have been in fevered rehearsals for months, and by now half of Athens must have heard Niko the second actor bellow in Socrates’ voice, _Zeus doesn’t exist!_

Alcibiades paces in a circle around Aristophanes, like a hunting cat. In the familiar confines of the townhouse and its courtyard he looks like a prop accidentally transposed from another play, Hector’s shield in the hands of Euripides’ ridiculous Medea. “Take him out.”

“Of the basket?”

“Of the _play_ , you nincompoop.”

“That’d kill it.”

“To see him slandered would kill me.”

“We’ve been slandering him all winter,” says Aristophanes. “Where’ve you been?”

“In Euboea,” says Alcibiades, almost sulkily. “I only just got back.”

Aristophanes’ alarm leaves him as swiftly as it came. This is a sign from Dionysus, lord of the stage, confirming the rightness of his work. And through the mouth of so delightful a messenger, too. “So,” he says, “you come here with your grievance, the night before the production—”

“At my earliest convenience, you best believe.”

“—in the hopes that I would—what? Grovel at your sandals—”

“I would not object.”

“—rewrite the damn thing overnight?”

“Change his name, at least,” says Alcibiades. “If you want to win.”

Aristophanes is poised somewhere between wild laughter and reaching for the nearest sword. Possibly it is not a good idea to challenge the nephew of Pericles to a duel the night before the Dionysia. “You peacock,” he says, “you prancing muse, you Stygian afflictation”—it is too late at night for meter, but not for bathos—“you bribed the judges?”

“I don’t have to,” says Alcibiades. It’s not a denial. His guileless smile belongs on one of those old-style votive statues that stand, stiff-limbed and serene, over the ancestral tombs. “Everyone knows Socrates. We’ve all seen him—”

“And heard him.”

“Haven’t you? You know he’s not an atheist, or a sophist, and he never told anyone to beat their fathers. It’s all untruth. The judges will know it, too.”

“But what _is_ untruth, my dear?”

“Oh, no,” says Alcibiades. He pokes a reproachful forefinger into the centre of Aristophanes’ chest. “Don’t socratise me.”

Aristophanes grins. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

“In life? Yes.”

“In my house at midnight?”

Alcibiades smiles, too: a slow, spreading, wolfish smile, full of bright teeth and danger. “Are you sure you haven’t studied with him?”

Aristophanes is not too many years removed from Chares the cranky pedagogue who would clout him in the ear for hanging around someone like Socrates; who would probably rise from the grave brandishing the old oak switch this very moment, if he saw who Aristophanes was speaking to, now. “Only from afar.”

“Come closer, then,” says Alcibiades. “You don’t know that damnable man like I do.”

His garland is slipping sideways over his eyes, the flowers crushed and wilting. “See, I owe him quite a debt.”

“Of blood?”

Aristophanes is thinking of an old story they all know: about the Battle of Potidaea, about an ephebe with a spear through his thigh, and an older man who lifted him onto a horse and led him from the field, the same way he would later drag him out of brothels and winehouses. Alcibiades pushes his garland back into place. Beneath the explosion of flowers, he seems to be giving this some real thought. “Of love.”

In the ditch outside the house, the water-toads are croaking accompaniment to a chorus of crickets. “Take him out,” says Alcibiades again. “Or you’ll make a lifelong enemy of me, Aristophanes son of Philippus.”

“Really? I shall tell everyone.”

“I _like_ your comedies, you know. I’ve seen every one. Shame if Cratinus and his wine flask were to win instead.”

Beneath the god’s touch Aristophanes feels his soul grow wings. Certainly no one ever bothered to bribe a judge for poor Cratinus. Nothing _he_ has to say is important enough. “Good thing I don’t compose entirely to win prizes, then.”

“Don’t you?” says Alcibiades. There is a new sharpness to his gaze: a new regard, perhaps. “No, I suppose not. That’s why you make me think, like old Socrates. That’s why you’re so annoying.”

He is listing away, back towards the gatepost and the shadowed street, and the torchlit escort who will convey him to wherever he next wishes to manifest. “I shall have to defame you again,” says Aristophanes.

“Do,” says Alcibiades. The hounds are still baying. “Or I shall be thoroughly disappointed.”

* * *

 _Clouds_ takes third place, to general outrage, behind both Cratinus and Ameipsias. The consensus among Aristophanes’ friends is that someone—someone with a lot of money and a vengeful streak—must have taken a personal dislike to him. He is invited to drown his sorrows at a great many dinner parties, hosted at fancy houses by people who would never have given him or his work a second glance before.

He accepts every invitation, though he really should be writing. That terrible sprite Alcibiades might be in attendance, after all.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Clouds_ came in third at the City Dionysia, behind Cratinus' _The Wine Flask_ and Ameipsias' _Connus_ (which apparently also lampooned Socrates). In his _Apology_ , Plato suggests that Aristophanes' depiction of Socrates as a crackpot sophist and atheist contributed to his execution via hemlock in 399.
> 
> Other references:
> 
>   * The title is one of Socrates' lines in _Clouds_. I'm partial to the Paul Roche translation, myself.
>   * Dicaeopolis was the anti-war protagonist of Aristophanes' _Acharnians_.
>   * Cleon was a warmonger-type general caricatured in just about every single one of Aristophanes' plays, and who (unsurprisingly) brought a lawsuit against him in his early career.
>   * The courtesan Simaetha was one of Alcibiades' many lovers.
>   * Socrates supposedly saved Alcibiades' life at the Battle of Potidaea in 432 BCE -- [here's an 18th-century illustration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Potidaea#/media/File:Battle_of_Potidaea_431_BCE.jpg)!
> 

> 
> ETA post-reveals: [@enemyofrome on tumblr](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com) / [@valeaidawrites on twitter](http://twitter.com/valeaidawrites) \-- come yell with me about these assholes!


End file.
